IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: No end in sight for coal ash waste spill in NC; Sniper attack exposes security vulnerabilities of aging US electrical grid; Fracking depleting water supplies in drought-stricken states; Tesla electric cars, now driving cross-country for free; PLUS: The Great Barrier Reef to become a sacrifice zone for coal ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Record number of billion-dollar disasters in 2013; How to deconstruct the difficult math of Keystone XL's carbon footprint; USDA launches 'climate hubs' to help farmers with drought; Winter Olympics: downhill forecast in a warming world; From Occupy to climate justice ... PLUS: Big Coal’s ash mess follows its chemical spill. Is this some kind of bad joke? ... and much, MUCH more! ...

"How do you clean this up?" he said, shaking his head as he churned up the ash with his paddle. "Dredge the whole river bottom for miles? You can't clean this up. It's going to go up the food chain, from the filter feeders, to the fish, to the otters and birds and people. Everything in the ecosystem of a river is connected."

Duke was warned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in September 2009 that the coal ash storage site was falling apart, and the EPA even noted several instances of coal ash sludge already leaking from corroded pipes. The EPA report also noted that portions of the dam that were supposed to be keeping the coal ash in its retention pond were crumbling.

The Australian agency tasked with managing the Great Barrier Reef has authorized what amounts to an experiment opposed by many scientists: how the iconic ecosystem will respond to mountains of sludge dumped into the waters between the reef and the Australian mainland.

In dozens of water-scarce counties where fracking is booming, water use is at or approaching more than a billion gallons a year.
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Texas "is Ground Zero in the debate." She said "groundwater levels are depleting rapidly" in areas of intense fracking there. "There's no denying that it has had a significant impact."

Unless we’re prepared to turn off a lot of lights and shut down a lot of factories real fast, we will have to continue to back away from coal gradually. And yes, that implies using more natural gas, which no matter what the anti-fracking forces say is a whole lot cleaner than coal and much less of a contributor to global warming.

In all, 41 weather events caused $1 billion or more in damage in 2013 according to a report recently released by Aon Benfield, a reinsurance group. That’s one more than the previous record set in 2010.

President Barack Obama's administration announced the formation on Wednesday of seven "climate hubs" to help farmers and rural communities adapt to extreme weather conditions and other effects of climate change.

Today, after a decade of increasing damage to Coke's balance sheet as global droughts dried up the water needed to produce its soda, the company has embraced the idea of climate change as an economically disruptive force.

Nations have so dragged their feet in battling climate change that the situation has grown critical and the risk of severe economic disruption is rising, according to a draft United Nations report. Another 15 years of failure to limit carbon emissions could make the problem virtually impossible to solve with current technologies, experts found.